# BLAKE3

16 Hacker News commenters recommended BLAKE3 and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free cryptographic hash function that is very fast and parallelizable, and that people often pick over SHA-256 for speed.

## Why people recommend it

- Very fast among strong hashes (6 comments): "BLAKE3 has a whole mechanism for this, and as an added bonus it'd be substantially faster." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766604)) "the performance difference with modern hashing algorithms is significant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887989)) "It's probably the fastest strong cryptographic hash function to date." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517914))
- Parallel tree-structured hashing (3 comments): "Not only it allows for good parallelism, but it also has a lot of cool property for data transfer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508639)) "I’m disappointed that they didn’t discuss my favorite feature of BLAKE3: it’s a tree hash." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048015)) "It's super fast on any input, fully parallelizable and has a built-in key mode." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46049729))
- Secure despite faster design (2 comments): "It's a different construction that still meets its full security target." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46050307)) "It's probably the fastest strong cryptographic hash function to date." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517914))
- Preferred default for many developers (3 comments): "defaults to BLAKE3 unless I have a good reason not to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063028)) "we switched from SHA-256 to BLAKE3 for hash-chaining" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672899)) "I use it in several pieces of software." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46053804))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [libsodium](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libsodium.md): 10 recommend
- [AWS-LC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-lc.md): 10 recommend
- [xxhash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xxhash.md): 9 recommend
- [pyca/cryptography](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pyca-cryptography.md): 8 recommend
- [BoringSSL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/boringssl.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "BLAKE3", https://hackerapproved.com/p/blake3/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).